Category: Psychology
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Shafts of light
From the chilly, detached sadness of last week, unexpected changes – a day and a bit that were more entwined with the life, and lives, around me – Friday, an official reception – you know the drill: speeches, food, suits, paintings for sale. But this one has much more life in it than most: an LGBT History…
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Everyday Life in the Later Roman Empire
If you think about it all: rot, chaos, aggression. Disintegration. But my desk remains, my job remains, my friends and colleagues remain… I buy food, talk to students, plan trips. There are no problems. To be honest, there have been some fairly disastrous periods even during my lifetime when one couldn't depend on governments for simple…
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Sketch of a conversation
… You didn't really think you were having strokes, did you. Well, if memory – no, I suppose not; there would be other symptoms? Yes, there would. So: dissociation. But more dissociation than I should expect, yes? That sense over the last few months, from the last year – more connected, more of myself aware of…
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At this point
A sudden bringing-into-awareness, and perhaps into words, of some of what has been going on for me in the past couple of years… in a time of political chaos and anxiety, where one thinks of the 1930s: including the bit where intellectuals were attacked for not being militant enough, not standing up to aggressively dark forces. Attacks that…
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What is it to…
What is it to 'go on', to 'leave behind', to 'finish with'? I don't quite mean moving on to doing something else, which is often coloured with the anticipation and energy of whatever it is that is new. ••• Over the past few weeks, my cable company has been running episodes of The Closer back…
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A Hollywood ending
So: although it has been a bad year – illness, anxiety, possible collapse of plans, disconnected from a culturally suicidal Britain, feeling cornered by the future – hospital, new medications, side effects – that year is now having a big Hollywood ending: after three or four days of some of the worst side effects I remember ever having, they are suddenly…
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At the moment…
things aren't bad today. My chest, stomach feel a bit heavy, a shadow of a headache, a sort of – can I say a fuzzy version of tingling, a bit like when you focus on parts of the body in meditations and body processes, except in this case not temporary? Don't know what you'd call that. I…
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Negative capability
Analysis, a couple of weeks ago. For some months, I rarely bring dreams in: I know that I am dreaming but can't remember anything. The previous week's single dream: a teenager who was stubborn, wouldn't speak, was angry at everything: the adults talk around him, being social and polite, but he throws off all our timing, our…
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Unexpected…
[8 July 2016] I am in Zürich for a week, at the end of the normal Jung-Institut training sessions… I went to the graduation ceremony; there was an unusually large number of graduates, including a lot of friends (some of whom started after I did, but oh well). Hope to be up there in a…
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Cracks in the world
A strange and fragmented time. It feels like a distant echo of the 1930s: erosion, disintegration of supports and safety. Feral rage, roving attacks. A distant whiff of rot and gunpowder. Milder, of course, by far – at least at this point in history: that weird sense that, with a massacre of innocents at a Florida gay bar,…
Paul Attinello 